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In all the highly developed civilizations of the past--Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, Anatolia, China--the pervasive influence of an imperial authority can be felt, providing patronage for the arts and directing the evolution of society. A close examination of the archaeological discoveries made in the Indus Valley seems to belie the presence of such an imperial authority in this civilization, which flourished some 5,000 years ago and covered almost twice the area of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley combined. Yet although it seems to have lacked an authoritarian regime, the Indus civilization had a well-disciplined way of life, civic controls and an organizational system which could only have stemmed from the kind of "rule by the people" that was exercised in some Greek city-states some 2,000 years later. Did Greece give birth to democracy, or did Greece simply follow a practice developed earlier?
The fact that the Indus Valley script has not yet been deciphered is certainly a handicap to attempts to draw any final conclusions, but there is a vast array of material evidence available to help archaeologists, social scientists and other scholars...